The Ultimate NBA Rivalry May Be Returning: Optimism for a Celtics-Lakers Final

It's time for the NBA playoffs again, and many cities and many fans are hopeful that their teams will contend for the big prize. If you are over thirty and have some kind of memory that ponders on the past, you may be reminiscing to an earlier, somewhat more innocent day, when tradition rang supreme and the coming of May meant the basketball playoff runs. My first experience with the NBA came in the early 1970s when teams like the Knicks, Lakers, Celtics and Sixers were contending every year, and the ABA was sort of secondary thought. It was a time when the Milwaukee Bucks, in a small market, had drafted the likes of Lew Alcindor, soon to be known as Kareem, and Wilt Chamberlain was rounding down a great career. I had missed the initial stages of that great Celtics-Lakers rivalry that obviously had been one-sided.

The history books and almanacs are filled with the names of the players in those days, and the coaches that seem legendary and beyond human existence today. Some have referred to the 1970s as bad times for the league, but it makes little of the characters that made us watch basketball before the days of the salary caps and the intense marketing. In fact, many may not even know of the early greats, when the Lakers were originally midway through the continent and the Bulls and Magic did not exist. Return, if you will, to a day when basketball was the least known of the professional sports, and before Kobe, Shaquille, and Tim Duncan. Imagine a world where two franchises ruled supreme and it seemed no one could end the dominance.